Seven Minutes In Heaven With Planet Femme’s Chloé Rossetti

Welcome to “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” GO Magazine’s interview series that profiles a different queer babe each day, by asking them seven unique (and sometimes random) questions. Get to know the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of the groundbreaking, fierce forces-of-nature in the queer community.

Chloé Rossetti is one of those people that I’m not sure how I became Facebook friends with, but I’m so glad I did. I remember their project “Planet Femme” popping up in my newsfeed and my eyes grew with intrigue. I love all things that explore femme energy, a whole planet? Yes, count me in. Their energy through the digital realm is healing and radically transformative.

Through this interview, I learned so much about Rossetti but also the universe at large. They are filled with knowledge that is accessible and empowering. Keep scrolling for a dose of femme inspiration. It will change your world.

GO Magazine: Who are you and what do you do?

Chloé Rossetti: My name is Chloé Rossetti. I come from Planet Femme: a literal and proverbial location, and a concept that encompasses all of my work to date.

I make performances, plays, films, videos, and texts that affirm life, beyond the one-way pathway of extinction afforded us by capitalism. My work is funny, dark, strange, healing, and perverse, much like nature.

Additionally, I am a Sensual Educator, facilitator, and coach, working under the umbrella of my business, Radical Nourishment.

My latest project, SUNRIDER, is a short film set a few hundred years in the future, after the death of Earth. The few remaining survivors, living in a femme-centric society, sail through space on a terraformed asteroid powered by an AI consciousness called AURORA. SUNRIDER is a sibling project to a novel of the same name.

In all of my work, I respond to the desertification that emerges from unsustainable, colonial approaches to the inseparable entities of mind, body, and earth. Harnessing my experience as a permaculturist, gender hybrid, healer, immigrant, and descendant of stregas, I manifest a vision of humanity as a regenerative presence on earth. The urgent task at hand is to decolonize; expand ecological consciousness; recognize queerness as a harbinger of change; cultivate embodied, optimistic worldbuilding; and celebrate the glory and pitfalls of our current means of communication and translation.

Part of KARAN DEVINE RETREATS, made in residence at The Shandaken Project

GO: Where do you go for inspiration when you’re feeling discouraged or depleted?

CR:Nature // water // earth // in the arms of one or many loved one/s // dancing // singing // drawing // watching my friends and heroes perform // friends’ houses // my house // nose in a book // art // music // Act-OUT at The Studio every Monday night.

GO: What does femme mean to you?

CR: I don’t believe in any binary, least of all the femme-masc binary. So “femme” to me is not one half of a binaric system, or even one end of a spectrum: it is the earth beneath the spell of capitalism. People in power would have us believe that we live on Planet Capital; in fact we live on Planet Femme. Planet Femme is earth. Everybody who remembers this returns to Planet Femme. And so the energy of “femme” is like a song that helps us to remember.

GO: Describe yourself in three words.

CR: Sensual; funnydark; nourishment; rulebreaker.

GO: What music are you listening to right now?

CR:L’Rain’s self-titled album, on which I make a cameo appearance(!). This album, I think, is about timely, untimely, and pervasive grief. Taja is a dear friend, and watching her birth this project over the past few years has been a powerful experience.

Planetarium by Bryce Dessner, James McAlister, Nico Muhly, and Sufjan Stevens: “Neptune” in particular has been my grief soundtrack for the past month or so. I’ve also been researching my Neptune transits while listening to this song.

The Feminine: Act II by Anna Wise: I listened to “Coconuts” on my way to see the solar eclipse on Short Mountain in Tennessee, and again in a homestead full of witches in upstate New York. People on the Planet Femme wavelength seem to instantly click with it.

Also everything by my sonic collaborator, Feathers Wise.

GO: Why do you think it’s so important to have queer-centric events and spaces?

CR: Queerness, to me, means change. It means the death of colonization, and it means ecological futurity. According to these definitions, I think and live in a queer way, and most of my friends do too. Therefore a “queer” space to me is actually a worldbuilding, a world-within-the-world, and a commons, where we can plant the seeds of the new reality in the husks of the old. Nothing is more vital and crucial in this and every moment.